US must take a call on terror-haven Pakistan

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh will not be the first terrorist to walk free in Pakistan. But his acquittal, on Thursday, by the Supreme Court on charges of kidnapping and beheading American journalist Daniel Pearl was curiously timed, just days after President Joe Biden, a Democrat, took office. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, expressed “outrage”, and secretary of state Antony Blinken said the acquittal was an “affront to terrorism victims everywhere”. Both of them, and the department of justice before them, offered to take over the case and prosecute Sheikh in the United States (US). This was first proposed by the administration led by President Donald Trump, a Republican, in December when a lower court overturned Sheikh’s conviction.

There is bipartisan support, therefore, for extraditing Sheikh to the US, and the time may have come for the Biden administration to make the call. An acquittal of this kind by the highest court in the land could have been explained perhaps as the cost, no matter how odious, of having an independent judiciary, in any other country. In Pakistan, Sheikh’s acquittal is yet another evidence of the country’s tight embrace of terrorism. The US knows that well, on a bipartisan basis. The Trump White House had “strongly condemned” the release of Hafiz Saeed, the Lashkar-e-taiba founder and mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, in 2017, and threatened “repercussions” if he was not rearrested immediately. He wasn’t. Islamabad had chosen, instead, to forfeit nearly $2 billion in security aid as ordered by Trump in a punitive action next month.

But in a brazen display of how counterterrorism works in Pakistan, Saeed was thrown behind bars on the eve of Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s July 2019 visit to Washington DC for a summit meeting with Trump. But then, seemingly struck by remorse, Pakistan begged the United Nations Security Council several weeks later to unfreeze Saeed’s bank account so he could withdraw, wait for it, his government pension. Clearly, Pakistan cannot deal with terrorism, just as America’s neighbours Colombia and Mexico couldn’t do so, when they struggled to stop the supply of narcotics into the US, overwhelmed by drug cartels that had taken over their governments and judiciary. The fearless drug lords came to fear eventually when the most-potent tool was deployed by the US against them, with the acquiescence of their governments — extradition to the US, to be tried and sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in high-security prisons.

Pablo Escobar, the Medellin cartel kingpin, who was killed by police eventually, had resisted extradition to the US through a nationwide campaign of terror and destruction. Joaquin Guzman, the Mexican druglord, better known as El Chapo, who had escaped from prison twice, couldn’t fight extradition eventually and is now serving a life sentence at a super-maximum-security prison in Colorado. Pakistan has continued to coddle terrorists. The new US administration will have to make tough choices.